So I was happy when my robot muscles and robot brain arrived in the post last week … and yesterday I set to work with the sole purpose of stripping one of my Roomba’s and interfacing with it …

Here are a few pics of how it all came together:

There’s the Meccano arm slightly re-designed to accomodate the servos. The arm is on a Meccano base that is fixed to the Roomba underneath. It clears the floor by about 1cm and provides a tray area for the little breadboards and the Arduino – which is the new brain

Can you see the thick purple wire? Well, that one connects the Arduino to the Roomba’s ROI port so I can gain access to all the motors and sensors also power for the Arduino via the ROI. This afternoon I’ve been sending various test programs to the brain to try and get a handle on communication through the ROI. Also wrote some code that controls the movement of the arm – although there’s no fancy AI or any kinematics going on yet ….

Sadly, my last attempt at flashing a new program into the brain caused some kind of hemotoma which led to severe neural damage leaving the poor thing doomed to repeat some buggy test code forever… It sux – the Arduino seems to run the current program fine – but won’t let me upload anything new … think I fried the ATMEGA168 … I don’t seem to be alone as there’s lots of posts about this happening online … As they are only cheap I will have to get a new chip for the Arduino before I can make a video of my robot doing something clever – definately won’t be before I go on my hols as I have so much proper work to be getting done before I leave … Grrrrrr 

Afer a bit of tinkering and parts swapping – I now have a perfectly working Roomba (the silver one) cleaning my floors – hurrah!! But the great thing about these robots is that they are totally hackable And this is what I plan to do with the second fella (the green one). He does everything bar vacuum – so it’s a perfect platform to build on and have some nerdy robotic fun and games Microsoft have released Microsoft Robotics Studio – which is a great free platform for visually programing robot logic – like controlling servo’s, motors, reading sensors etc. and they have support for Roomba too   which makes it a good place to start learning.

However, I also got hold of a set of classic Meccano! Remember that? So today I  have spent a perfectly sunny afternoon being 8 years old again building things with my new toy. The box came with a leaflet for building a crane, a car and a plane, which nice as they are, weren’t exactly the reason behind geting it …

… but this was:

hehehe …

… can you see what I did there?  hahaha … it’s an arm with 5 or 6 degrees of freedom (shoulder x2, elbow, wrist, hand … and grip).

To get this moving I’m gonna have to grab a bunch of servo’s and a programmable AVR microcontroller. It will take a bit more work interfacing with my Roomba … and I’ll probably have to ditch MSRS and just wire Roomba’s sensors and motors into the AVR as well … but I like a challenge and it’s going to be the dope when it’s all working.

Watch this space …